A Role Playing Games Blog
Basic Roleplaying
Freebies: Renaissance
2December 6, 2011
Yay! I have been waiting for this since I first read about it: Renaissance is a free roleplaying system designed for historical and fantasy games in, as the authors put it, “age of blackpowder weapons”. It was created by Peter Cakebread and Ken Walton who are known for Clockwork & Chivalry 1st Edition and Abney’ Park’s Airship Pirates. Renaissance is based on D101 Games’ OpenQuest which itself is based on Mongoose Publishing’s Runequest SRD.
The 139-paged PDF contains all the rules needed to play, two magic systems and a bestiary. Kudos to Cubicle 7 and Cakebread & Walton for releasing the rules for free. The PDF doesn’t contain any artwork, but that’s negligible especially since the PDF is mainly meant as a System Reference Document. The rules of the game can be used under the OGL.
If you are a fan of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying and Runquest, you actually have the choice between quite a few different rule variants now. There’s Renaissance, Mongoose Publishing’s Legend, D101 Games’ OpenQuest, Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying and Goblinoid Games’ GORE. All those games are more or less compatible, so you can use material designed for one game in the other with ease.
Renaissance looks pretty interesting because it was created with the Renaissance era in mind. The magic system also looks pretty unique. If you’re looking for a skill-based RPG with a percentile dice mechanic, you should definitely check Renaissance out!
Interview: Sarah Newton
1October 5, 2011
Some of you might still remember my review of Legends of Anglerre which I posted a while ago. While reading this book I thought it would be a blast to do an interview with its lead writer and editor Sarah Newton. Luckily Sarah agreed to answer a couple of question for us.
Stargazer: Thanks for taking your time to answer a few questions for our blog, Stargazer’s World. Let’s start with a couple of questions about you. Can you please tell our readers who you you are? I especially would like to know what your first roleplaying game was and how you came to work in the RPG industry.
Sarah: My name’s Sarah Newton, and I work for Cubicle 7 as head of their editorial team and line developer and house writer on the Starblazer Adventures, Legends of Anglerre, Cthulhu Britannica, and World War Cthulhu lines. I’m also responsible for their translated games, including Qin and the upcoming Yggdrasil. I’ve been gaming for (cough cough) over thirty years, and am absolutely passionate about the hobby. I began with Tunnels and Trolls back in 1980 – the old pink "Buffalo Castle" was the very first RPG product I ever bought, even before the rules, and I ended up having to make my own rules to play it! After that I got into Traveller, RuneQuest, Dungeons and Dragons (White Box then AD&D), and then pretty much all major RPGs right up to the present day, with the exception of White Wolf, which for some reason I kind of missed – I’ve only recently discovered Exalted, though I like it a lot.
Chessex Battlemat Review
8May 11, 2010
One of the most important things as a Dungeon Master that you can have at your Dungeons and Dragons game is a battlemat. It’s one of the items I struggled with for the longest time before I finally settled on one to buy. There are a hand full of choices for Battlemats and reviews for them are hard to come by. In the end I finally settled on the Chessex Battlemat.The Chessex Battlemat is a “expanded” (i guess they mean stretched) vinyl mat with 1″ Squares on one side and 1′ Hexes on the reverse side. The battlemat was shipped and packaged very well. I was worried about a rolled up tube of vinyl getting damaged in the mail, but my worries where for not.
Some care instructions came with the Battlemat instructing me to use only wet erase markers (which i found at a local store) and never to use any red or orange markers. Something in the ink makes them permanently stain the vinyl. Never to fold the mat but rather just roll it up into a tube.
When I first opened the mat it had some wrinkles that you can see in my photos. But after a few games those wrinkles have dissapeard and the mat lays flat at every game.
I now currently own two Chessex Battlemats. When I first started using the Battlemats I would draw out my dungeons on the fly. Keeping my players guessing as to what was coming up around each corner. Lately however, I have switch to drawing out my dungeons before hand. This can kill the eliment of surpize for my players but it does allow me to draw very detailed maps and I almost always get some oohh’s and aawww’s from my party. That’s saying a lot for a guy who can’t draw.
Old McWhateley had a cult… Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! – My Top 5 Lovecraftian gaming products
7April 27, 2010
In keeping with the theme of Lovecraftian Week here in Stargazer’s World I want to do a series of mythos themed top five lists inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. And since this is a gaming blog what better list to start with that my Top 5 Lovecraftian gaming products!
Hopefully it will be equal parts nostalgia and mini-review; I’ll try to include some gaming tidbits or ideas that can be of use to you. So without further ado gentle reader here we go…
Basic Roleplaying
3March 18, 2009
If you ever played Call of Cthulhu or RuneQuest you know Basic Roleplaying, the Chaosium Roleplaying System. Recently Chaosium released a generic BRP book that is meant to be a generic roleplaying game system that can be used to power any game regardless the genre. The people at Chaosium took the basic system that powered their games for a long time, added optional rules from it’s various iterations and put it all into a massive 404-page book. Although the attribute scale is 0-21 it’s mostly a d%-based system. All skill and combat rolls are done with percentile dice.
I recently picked up a copy of that book and I love it. Since I first played Call of Cthulhu I admired the simplicity of the underlying system. Later I bought a copy of RuneQuest, Elric and Hawkmoon and added them to my collection of BRP-driven games. I often thought about using the system in Elric or CoC to run games in other worlds and genres but in the end I always used other systems. But now this is finally much easier to pull off since the Basic Roleplaying book is a great toolbox if you want to build your own version of the BRP system.
I will definitely use the BRP system in the near future (I am still thinking about the SF setting I wrote about in my Goals for 2009 post). Even using it for a one-shot should be simple enough since it has everything you need to play, even including monsters and NPCs for several different genres. And even if you don’t plan to run a homebrew campaign or the like, you can still use a lot of the optional rules in your CoC game for example.
By the way, I first heard about this fine book in Kurt Wiegel’s video review:
Has anyone of my readers actually used BRP to run his homebrew campaign or a conversion? What are your thoughts? How easy is it to pull off something like that?
You have a question about an existing or upcoming Stargazer Games product? Ask away! You want to know what we think about a recent development in the RPG industry? Send in your questions. You always wanted to know what we think about game X? Send us an email.
